Living with rapidly worsening eyesight

Photo by Victoria Hu

Who said eyes have to be circles?

For a solid 8 years of my life, I’ve lived with embarrassingly bad nearsightedness — specifically, high myopia with astigmatism. Without glasses on, tomatoes look like fat apples, pencils look like small sticks and my English homework looks like a doctor wrote it.

The mystery is how my eyesight worsened to this degree. I was never one of the iPad kids growing up, so it feels unfair that others were able to play Minecraft for 6 hours straight and keep up their 20/20 vision, while reading a book leads to my nearsightedness increasing by another 200 degrees.

I’d like to think that my poor eyesight must be because of the genes passed down from my parents — who also wear glasses — but it might just be because of the heaps of fantasy novels I read and heaps of Chinese books I supposedly read. So really, just the novels (sorry, mom).

My nearsightedness started showing itself early on during elementary school. I constantly squinted and blinked, but my family delayed taking me to the doctor and instead chalked up my symptoms to a bad temper and  dry California air. Their denial lasted another few years, during which I continued walking into glass screens like a fly and staring blankly at the indecipherable scrawl on school whiteboards. 

In third grade, I remember panicking when I was called on to read off the projector, because I didn’t want to seem illiterate to my classmates. I could’ve just requested to be moved to the front, but that would mean moving closer to the teacher as well. This was clearly much too large of a sacrifice, so I chose to continue decoding blurry ciphers instead.

At some point that year, my parents realized that my eyesight was a legitimate problem and bought my first pair of glasses. I was teased at school for looking even more like a nerd than I already was and for being “legally blind.” It’s just a shame I didn’t get an assistance dog on my 10th birthday to go with the glasses.

Glasses also came along with all the typical annoying things people with perfect 20/20 vision and perfect, spherical, ray-diagram-worthy eyes like to say. For those individuals who like shoving their fingers 2 mm in front of my face and asking “how many am I holding up?”, please back off. I know how to count to five. My eyeballs — no sorry, my astigmatic eye-ovals — are glaring at you. 

First-world complaints aside, life was fine. For the first time since first grade, I was able to see. 

The issue is that this bliss lasted only until 5th grade, when I needed a new pair of glasses. Sadly, my prescription climbs every year, as consistent and inevitable as global warming. Every time I visit the eye doctor, I am genuinely terrified of finding out my new prescription and facing my mom’s wrath. 

One time, I tried memorizing the eye testing letter chart, but my doctor caught on and switched it out for another. I came out of her office that day nearly crying from knowing my new (very horrible) prescription, the letters “E, FP, TOZ” memorized by heart.

Unfortunately, it also turns out that my nearsightedness is too high to safely do lasik surgery without risking bursting an eyeball, so all I can really do about my eyesight is take more breaks while doing homework (sure, happy to do that), spend more time outside and hope that someone invents better surgery before I die. So basically, my doctor told me to touch grass and cope.

When I was younger, I tried all sorts of voodoo eye exercises, hoping they could train myself to see better. There’s the classic wikihow “pencil exercise” where you focus on a pencil while moving it closer to your face, which I practiced daily. I got very good at hypnotizing myself and being cross-eyed, but was disappointed to find out that this didn’t magically fix my nearsightedness. 

Having resigned myself to my fate, my job now is to take better care of my somewhat functioning eyes, which have somehow survived all of the Zoom classes and APUSH readings I’ve put them through. My new year’s resolution — the very same every year — is to make sure that my prescription doesn’t change.

Fingers crossed. If I wish hard enough (and sleep enough), maybe a miracle will happen.